Professor Emma Steenkamp is a full professor in the Department Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. She is the Director of the Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology, which is funded by the South African Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and the National Research Foundation (NRF). This Centre is hosted by the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), which is the premier institute of its kind in the world. She is an associate editor for the peer-review journal European Journal of Plant Pathology and serves on the councils for the Southern African Society for Systematic Biology (SASSB) and the South African Society for Microbiology (SASM). She is also a member of the Subcommittee for the Taxonomy of Rhizobium-Agrobacterium, which is one of the working groups of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes.
Emma is a specialist in the systematics, genetics, and evolution of fungi and bacteria. She has authored/co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in ISI-rated journals and her work has been cited more than 2800 times in the scientific literature (see Emma’s FABI and Google Scholar profiles for information about her research and publications). By the end of 2019, 16 PhD and 30 MSc students have graduated under her supervision, while she typically supervises 10-15 postgraduate students. She also leads a number of mentorship programmes aimed at attracting students to postgraduate studies and cultivating the next generation of academics.
